Timeline for What does "I need a 10 in silver" mean?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 18, 2022 at 13:37 | comment | added | Darrel Hoffman | Up until 1965, US dimes and quarters (not nickels unless you go back to 1883) were made with actual silver. This show being in the 80's, those would still be in fairly common circulation. Even now you occasionally spot them - you can tell by the lack of a copper stripe on the edges (or just check the year if you know about that). But yeah, the phrase obviously refers to the color rather than the actual material. | |
| Mar 17, 2022 at 22:30 | comment | added | Banjoe | For what it's worth, I work in the casino industry in the US, and in table games coins are still referred to as "silver" since "quarters" and "nickels" are slang for $25 and $5 chips respectively. | |
| Mar 17, 2022 at 15:22 | comment | added | Seth R | Up until 1964, US quarters did actually contain silver, and this was widely known. Being that Cheers was made in the 80s and the adult characters would have been alive during that time (and in fact, most were old enough to have been adults in the 60s even), I could see "silver" being a slang term explicitly for quarters. | |
| Mar 17, 2022 at 14:43 | comment | added | user3067860 | It doesn't really need to have anything to do with actual silver, because the coins are still silver-colored. Even in the 80s, giving someone a bunch of pennies was basically useless, so your choices for money are "silver" (coins) or "green" (bills). | |
| Mar 17, 2022 at 13:49 | history | edited | Eli Harold | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 3 characters in body
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| S Mar 17, 2022 at 12:19 | history | suggested | AndreasKralj | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Changed representation of numbers to match professional conventions, and cleaned up grammar
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| Mar 17, 2022 at 11:38 | comment | added | Jonathan |
silver and money are the same word in some languages (Hebrew - כסף, others too). So maybe this is an old-timey saying from when money was coins?
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| Mar 17, 2022 at 11:32 | comment | added | Chris H | Similarly to the exclusion of US pennies, in British English "silver" refers to coins from 5p to 50p (the latter being about 65¢ US), from their long-standing colour (nickel alloy). Smaller denominations are copper (plate these days) while £1 coins are a golden brass and the more recent £2 coins two-tone brass and nickel. US$1 coins have been both silver and brass, but never common, while quarters are needed for many coin-operated machines | |
| Mar 17, 2022 at 2:31 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Mar 17, 2022 at 12:19 | |||||
| Mar 16, 2022 at 19:17 | comment | added | Ronald Sole | Your useful answer could use a bit more punctuation, especially commas. There's a widespread convention in media circles (I've worked for several international broadcasters) that journalists should write out numbers from one to ten and use digits thereafter. It makes life much simpler for newsreaders - and for the rest of us as well. | |
| Mar 16, 2022 at 17:52 | vote | accept | AndreasKralj | ||
| Mar 16, 2022 at 17:47 | history | edited | Eli Harold | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 485 characters in body
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| Mar 16, 2022 at 17:42 | history | answered | Eli Harold | CC BY-SA 4.0 |